Within the scope of PHotoESPAÑA Festival, Juan Manuel Castro Prieto and Rafael Trapiello present the exhibition Solovki, from May 22 to August 24 at the Centro de Arte Alcobendas (Madrid).

In mid-White Sea, Solovki is the main island of Solovetsky archipelago (Russia). The Orthodox complex of Solovetsky monastery, listed as World Heritage by UNESCO, is located on the most preserved area of the island, on the shores of a natural harbor.
Last but not least, Solovki also was a Soviet jail. According to Alexandre Soljenitsyne, it has been the mother Gulag, this dreadful Soviet prison system of labor camps. Effective from 1924 to 1939, it has been used as the basis for all of other jails.
Nowadays islanders, monks and authorities try to burry this tragic past.
Yet, places have a memory and it is still engraved in inhabitants’ life. It is present in their everyday life and one cannot escape history that easily. The fact that Solovki is an island right in the middle of the White Sea – named this way as it freezes half of the year – accentuates the recollection of the prison in the collective unconscious. Only one plane a week – if weather conditions are good enough - link the archipelago to the continent.
By using a narrative form closer to poetry than documentary, Juan Manuel Castro Prieto and Rafael Trapiello explored this territory between hell and heaven : their images are obsessed by an odd tension between spirituality, the beauty of landscapes and this awful past carrying a lot of weight.